Canadian Television Looks at Urbanism, Public Health, and Mobility

With the “Intro to Urbanism” in the rear view mirror, I’ll let Canadian television carry the ball today with a 19-minute program that touches upon two different aspects of urbanism, both introduced by folks I’ve often mentioned in this blog.

First, Charles Montgomery, author of “Happy City”, talks about the public health implications of living in suburbia where there are no useful destinations within walking distance and where sidewalks are often missing.

Next, Brent Toderian, former Planning Director for Vancouver, B.C. takes a television crew on a tour of Medellin, Columbia, long known for the brutality of its drug cartels but now rebounding with urbanist innovation.

(By the way, the broadcast pronunciation of Toderian as “TAH-de-run” is correct.  I’d made the seemingly reasonable assumption that the name was pronounced “tah-DEH-ree-an”, but was educated otherwise during the most recent annual meeting of the Congress of the New Urbanism.)

Toderian visits the newest mobility elements of Medellin.  First, he shows how the residents of low income housing on a steep hillside were better integrated into the city with escalators.  It’s inspiring to watch the pride of the residents in their new transit system, constructed for a surprisingly low $6 million.  (I’ll suggest that $6 million worth of escalators created much more benefit than many $50 million freeway interchanges.)

Although we usually think of escalators in the U.S. inside of retail stores or for access into transit stations, there at least a few places where the escalators themselves are the transit system.  Downtown Seattle has a network of escalators, some inside of private buildings but open to the public as a condition of land-use approval, to manage the downtown streets rising sharply from Puget Sound.  Also, the ballpark in Chattanooga sits on a rocky knob above the Chattanooga River and has an escalator for access from the adjoining downtown.

Next, Toderian rides a gondola that was constructed to reach a neighborhood of Medellin near the top of the steep valley walls.  Aerial transit systems are unusual in the U.S., but not unknown.  The Roosevelt Island Tramway above the East River is probably the best known, but has been recently joined by other aerial systems.

And I’ve suggested that aerial transit would be a useful addition to Suisun City, linking the residents on the east side of the Suisun Channel with the downtown on the west side.  Yes, the solution is likely neither physically nor financially feasible, but would be a great way to make a car-free life on the eastside a more reasonable option.

Enjoy the video.  I think you’ll find it worth your time.  And it may even trigger some creative juices.

Next time, I’ll offer personal thoughts about how to build better relationships among the various parties to land-use decisions.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Intro to Urbanism, Part Ten: Summing Up, Further Reading, and an Example Life

One of my favorite college memories, at least among those I can share publicly, is from my senior year.  I was in the living room of my student apartment, reclining in a beanbag chair, enjoying an Oly, and listening as I copied a vinyl album onto reel-to-reel tape.  (Did I mention it was the 70s?)

It was late in the school year.  Only a couple of weeks later, my roommate and I would be disturbed from studying for finals by the sound of students marching on our street, celebrating the fall of Saigon.  (Did I mention it was Berkeley?)

The record I was copying was “Flavours” by the Guess Who.  The album came late in the history of the Guess Who and foreshadowed their later rebirth as Bachman Turner Overdrive.  The earlier pop sound of the band was being replaced by a deeper, darker bass-oriented sound.  The song that was playing was “Long Gone”.  The few lyrics, that were more in the nature of tortured aphorisms in a low register, felt like they had to fight their way to the surface through the bass line, only to be immediately reabsorbed by the music.

As I was thus imbibing and listening, my roommate returned from class, tossed his books on the table, and headed to the refrigerator for his own beer.  But before popping the top, he cocked his head toward the music with a puzzled look.  “Who’s the group?”

“The Guess Who.”

“Doesn’t sound much like the Guess Who.”

Before I could a respond, the deep voice rose from the dark pool of driving bass.  “Who the hell are you to try and criticize?”

My roommate, flustered by the perfectly timed interjection, fumbled to reply.  “Well ... I ... um …”

The voice declared “You’re still learning how to form an opinion.”

Thoroughly flummoxed, my roommate sank onto the couch to drink his beer and to listen to the remainder of the album in silence.

My reel-to-reel tape player has long since slipped a belt.  It may remain in the attic, in a corner next to a dusty pile of reel-to-reel tapes including the one with “Flavours”.  Other than occasionally smiling about the time that my roommate was humiliated by a piece of vinyl, I rarely thought about the album over the years.

But then I bought the CD last fall.  And I worked it into my rotation as I was working on my New Year’s “Intro to Urbanism”.  And I soon found that “You’re still learning how to form an opinion” was haunting me.  Although in my case, it wasn’t so much forming an opinion as in expressing it effectively that was troubling.

Today is the conclusion of my New Year’s “Intro to Urbanism” series.  I’m pleased that I undertook the task.  And I don’t disown anything I wrote.  (Although I may soon take another stab at a definition.)

But I’m not satisfied with the effort.

Over the nearly 500 posts in this blog, I’ve learned how to polish a single idea and present it in a single post, most of which met my personal standards for logic and grammar.  I was selecting, polishing, and sharing a single pearl in cupped hands.  And I think I’ve succeed, at least moderately.

But the “Intro” was a different task, more so than I had realized when I blithely accepted the challenge.  It was assembling a string of pearls of matching styles.  And I underestimated how different that would be from writing single posts.

I don’t regret making the effort.  I only regret not doing better for those who follow me.  But I’m not surrendering.  I’ll work and rework what I wrote this year, with a better understanding of the task, and be ready with a new and improved “Intro” for January 2016.  I can’t allow the words from a long ago Guess Who song to haunt me again.

Summing It Up: Whatever misgiving I may have about the total product, I’ve reached the end of “Intro to Urbanism”.  After presenting my modest credentials, I offered a definition for urbanism.  (That’s the definition I may rework.)  I explained why urbanism matters, digging deeply into the finances and also touching on energy usage.  Lastly, I wrote about how public places, streets, and buildings function differently in an urbanist world.

All that remains is to provide ideas for those who are motivated to do further study.

Organizations: Although there are a great many organizations doing fine work, I find the material that speaks best to me at the Congress for the New Urbanism, StrongTowns, Smart Growth America, and Project for Public Places.  For a couple of those organizations, some of their material is behind paywalls, but the free stuff is still worth your attention.  Plus, joining is also a good idea.

Books: If you prefer to hold stuff in your hands, even if it’s an e-book, “Suburban Nation” by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck is often cited as a starting point for modern urbanism.

“Happy City” by Charles Montgomery writes persuasively on how the drive to suburbia hasn’t made us happier.

“Walkable City” by Jeff Speck is a small gem of a book, imminently accessible yet powerful.

If you prefer to have your activism fueled by moral outrage, “The Geography of Nowhere” by James Howard Kunstler might meet your need.

Finally, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” is the legitimate capstone of great urbanist reading lists.  The insights of Jane Jacobs ring as true today as when she wrote them over fifty years ago.

But the concepts in Jacobs’ masterworks can be complex.  I usually recommend starting elsewhere and working up to Jacobs.  However, I have a reader who, intrigued by my blog, secured a copy of Jacobs and plowed right through it.  It was something like learning to swim by leaping from the high dive.  But the reader survived just fine and has become a strong-willed advocate for urbanist causes.

Twitter: Okay, there’s a lot of superfluous fluff on Twitter, but there’s also a lot of great stuff if you can be discerning.  I’d start my urbanist follow list with Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns (@clmarohn), Brent Toderian, former chief planner for Vancouver, B.C. (@BrentToderian), and Jeff Speck (@JeffSpeckAICP).  If you check in just once a day and follow a link provided by just one of these folks, you’ll soon learn much.  I promise.

This Blog: I won’t put myself anywhere near the level of the organizations, authors, and Twitter folks I’ve listed above.  But I try to highlight some of the best stuff they offer, sometimes connecting it to real world examples in the North Bay.  Plus I appreciate readers.  They’re my only compensation.  If you want to receive an email every time I publish a new blog, drop me an email at my address below.  Or just check in regularly.

Example Life: One last thing.  Some may have followed the “Intro” thinking that the theories were interesting, but that most people didn’t really want to live in an urbanist world.  To those folks, let me tell you about a recent conversation I had.

Over the holidays, I chatted with a lovely niece I rarely see.  She, her husband, and her two young sons were visiting from their new home in Berlin, Germany.  Our schedules overlapped for a short time on Boxing Day.

The two make an affluent couple.  The husband is unwinding from a fifteen-year career in international banking and is plotting his next moves.  My niece has been a successful graphic designer in New York City and London, and is now working to establish herself in Berlin.

So where and how do they live?  Quite happily in a 1,100 square-foot home on the sixth and top floor of a new building in a busy Berlin neighborhood.  They own a car, with twin car seats strapped in back, but find that most of their daily lives can be most easily accomplished on foot or on the extensive transit system.  And on the occasions when the car is the best option for an outing, they report that traffic is quite manageable because so many people are using transit or walking.

Nor is this their first time living a relatively urban lifestyle.  Their lives in New York City and London were similar.

My niece and her husband aren’t unique.  They’re typical of the coming generation.  And if we want our cities to thrive as the new generations take charge, we need to be paying attention.

Thanks for hanging around for the “Intro to Urbanism”.  Hopefully I’ve given you a good start toward understanding urbanism.  And hopefully you can build upon that start before a deep, disembodied voice accuses you of not knowing how to form an opinion.

Next time, I’ll share a recent program from Canadian television on the public health and mobility benefits of urbanism.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Once Again, It’s Time to Reflect and to Plan

With the hours of 2013 rapidly dwindling, this post was to be about my urbanist resolutions for the New Year.  So I began by dividing my goals into two stacks, urbanist and personal, a task that seemed logical to me at the time.

And then Brent Toderian illuminated the error in my thinking.  Toderian, a city planner who I’ve often referenced here, makes a sound and incontestable argument that the personal and the urbanist needn’t be separate.  Instead, a great many self-improvement tasks can also strengthen one’s city.

If you have time to read only one blog post about New Year’s resolutions, read Toderian’s.   He writes with a measured good sense and astute insight to which I can only aspire.

If you’ve finished Toderian’s resolutions and are still willing to spend a few minutes on my less profound thoughts, here they are:

Write better: I have an old high school friend who writes eloquently about his wife’s potentially fatal illness.  He digs deep and finds gems of wisdom to share about the emotional travails that both of them experienced.  I often congratulate him on his words, describing my efforts as “stolid and pedantic” in comparison.

 There is humorous self-deprecation in that description, but there is also a soupcon of truth.  I’m working to improve the emotional content and persuasiveness of my words, an effort that will continue.

Become more willing to speak out: Given the publishing schedule of this blog, you’d think that speaking out isn’t a problem for me.  But there are times when the spoken word carries far more weight than the written word.

Perhaps my greatest regret of 2013 is not speaking on behalf of extending the Petaluma road diet further south.  I don’t think my public comments would have made a difference, but would have been better than silence.  I’ll do better in 2014.

Study more: At CNU 21, Andres Duany highlighted the wealth of good writing being done about urbanism.  I need to set aside more time to delve into the growing wealth of insight and analysis.  If anyone is looking for a reading list, Brent Toderian (there he is again!) recently wrote of the top 100 books on city planning that he’d read.

Dig deeper: My resolution for 2013 was to embrace being an urban generalist.  I think I met that goal.  But sometimes it’s feels like I skitter between subjects like a water bug.  I don’t know what the subjects will be, but in 2014 I’ll find an urbanist subject or two in which to dig more deeply.

Find ways to motivate more folks: I’m pleased by the participation in Petaluma Urban Chat.  It’s been a benefit that I didn’t expect when I began this blog.  But there is still room for more participation, both in attendance at Urban Chat and in Urban Chat folks making their leanings known at city halls throughout the North Bay.  My task will be to help foment that growth.

Travel smarter: Every year, I take a trip after which I realize that I was close to an urbanist destination that I should have visited.  One needn’t spend time at a public plaza or town center to write about it, but the visceral feel of shoes on urban sidewalks adds emotional weight.  For 2014, I’ll spend more time on advance research, so I don’t miss something I’ll later regret.

Make a difference: Reading the jubilation in Santa Rosa about a pending street widening project is a reminder that there are many minds yet to be educated about the truths of walkable urbanism.  It’s not a destination that will be reached in 2014, but I’ll do my part to ensure that urbanism makes progress in the coming year.

Those are my thoughts.  You’re encouraged to supplement below.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)